Virtual Human

Game Mechanics
#1

Are there any resources, that let me model a virtual human. I’m not talking about the whole Inverse Kinematics thing, but more something like a simple model( with say 18 bones with constrains ? ODE joints??). That is easy enough to manouvre, and source well documented.

thanks

Paul

#2

newbTon concluded there were no good free implementations at the moment and tried to do one. Interestingly his posts even had the same subject as your post (VirtualHuman). Have a raid of the archives to look at what people said at the time. newbTon said he would post some source but I don’t think he got it working :frowning:
Its tricky… I have no personal knowledge on the subject though

#3

Haha. I found his last post on the subject actually…

[quote]OK, I’ve now tried ODE for about 6 months. It’s been a great learning process, before I knew nothing about physics engine, now I know alot more (of course).

What I can say now for sure though is…ODE IS NOT SUITED FOR CREATING ARTICULATED RAGDOLLS.

What I mean by this is, ragdolls who moves with the help of angular motors.

First I tried using only Amotors with joint balls and stops on the motors axises. Should work according to the manual, but NO, stops are not working on AMotors. So you can pose and move the ragdoll around, but once he goes limb (dies) he immediately turns into a pile of bones. Cute !

So fine, ok just wasted a month , now had to regroup.
Then I tried using hinge joints. They work pretty well, except its hard to simulate balljoints (shoulders,hips) using
only hingejoints. BUT ok, I found a way, I just used 3 hingejoints. Now he poses fine, he can move with different speeds. He can go limb as well. Problem is, after a while LCP Internal Error message turns up. Shortly after the dude explodes.
I tried to tweak every single parameter in ODE, but it doesnt matter.
I don’t believe that my ragdoll is so complicated that ODE cant handle it. It’s really doing NOTHING out of the ordinary. Except using Amotors, which is fairly new right ?

Some of there things are very clearly full of bugs. So the “ODE people” should have written this on the ODE homepage instead of acting as if everything is so stable and matured.

Sorry I’m just a little disappointed. Since ODE can’t solve my problem, does anyone know about other Java physics engines out there ? (or just bindings, like ODE).

Thanks for reading this,

NWBTON
[/quote]

#4

all i want to do is, lock the coordinates of the head at a certain coordinates and also do this for a feet, and then move the body freely around. While retaining the locked positions, i’m not yet talking about ragdoll stuff, although it would be nice to provide this also
any good links perhaps than;)

#5

For something like that you might want to try a verlet-integrator. (see: google :P)

#6

See : http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030121/jacobson_01.shtml (need free registration, very good resources)

#7

Actually I’ve got it working now (more or less lol). I wouldnt mind post post the code.

Heres the original post. There’s an early demo for download here too.

http://www.java-gaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=10050.0

It’s not THAT well documented (to say the least) but it’s not that complicated either.
http://onlineboxing.net/files/images/Screenshot-3.png
http://onlineboxing.net/files/images/Screenshot.png
http://onlineboxing.net/files/demo/Screenshot-1.png
http://onlineboxing.net/files/demo/builder.png
http://onlineboxing.net/files/demo/builder2.png

EDIT

I’m waiting for approval at dev.java.net so anyone interrested can download the code off cvs there.

#8

that would be nice, so i can understand what’s going on:)